Sometimes we know a journey will be a grand adventure. The three-week expedition this winter with my botanist friends who were to carry out some fieldwork to enchanted northern Pakistan was surprising. My friends were to work in the dispersal areas surrounding the Nagar Valley and I was content with stumbling onto a wonderful experience of seeing a new valley I had only read about.
People from Baltistan who arrived over the mountains by crossing the Biafo and Hispar Glaciers might have been first to settle in Nagar, the former kingdom across the river from Hunza. A man called Borosh is said to have founded the first village in the Valley and married a Balti girl he found there. The legend has it that the girl and her grandmother were the sole survivors of a landslide that killed all the earlier Balti settlers in Nagar area.
Just beyond the Ganesh Bridge across the Hunza River, the jeep track leaves the Karakorum Highway to enter Nagar. The first few kilometers of this pathway are dry and barren, and then the path bifurcates: a branch crosses the Hispar River on a bridge and climbs up into the fertile villages of central Nagar. Trees that one sees here owe their existence to the human hands and the careful construction of irrigation channels by natives.
A trail to the Nagar valley winds around the mountain with splendid and ever-changing Himalayan views and arrives at a little village with apricot trees in bloom next to a huge glacier. Botanists say the original genus of apricot, the ur-apricot (also walnut and rose), comes from this area or the nearby Pamirs. The climate is certainly ideal for them.
Located about 65 kilometres north of Gilgit, the capital of the Northern Areas, the Nagar Valley is a cluster of small hamlets. The Valley expands northward from these villages, adding in their summer meadows, gorges, and snow capped mountain ridges.
Nasirabad is the largest village in the area with about 400 households. It has grown since the opening of Karakorum Highway, which passes through Nasirabad. The other villages of the area are smaller, dotted amongst the tapestries of fruit trees, small fields, and painstakingly structured fields.
The people, forests, plants, and wild animals have all adapted to find a niche within this unique environment. Nasirabad has one such spring which is famous for having excellent mineral water. The white marble mines in Nasirabad are known to be the second best in the world. Minerals like zumurrad and ruby are also found in and around the Valley and are on sale in shops for travelers mostly.
Article comments
1 - John Spivey
This is a very good article. I wish that I could see such a sight and that the world was safe enough to freely do so. You are fortunate to have experienced this. Mathiessen's book is a classic. It influenced a lot of my observation of nature and my writing.
2 - brianna
man snow leopards are so pretty